Doors are closing – please mind the gap!

This week: This week – Up on the roof; No AI in use here; Covers Off!; Photo woes; Doors are closing – please mind the gap;

This week – Up on the roof

As we pass the Autumn Equinox and head inexorably towards winter, I have mainly been doing odd jobs again this week.

Early on Friday morning we had rain, as useful 5.3 mm or 5.3 litres per m². We were on the very edge of the storm, the most active part and heaviest rain was out to the south west. However this is the first significant rainfall we have received since May.

When I checked the waterproofing which I carried out in the summer, the leak sealant has prevented any moisture getting to my wood supply. However there was still a tiny amount of water ingress around the concrete support pillar.

Looking above the pillar, this area of the terrace is ever so slightly lower than the rest and the rain had pooled there.

I don’t view this as a major problem, rather I will go around with the leak sealant again and give the joint a second coat.

However I need to let the concrete dry out first. That in itself is not a problem, because looking ahead, there is no sign of any more rain for the next two weeks.

In fact, all the signs are that October is going to be warmer and dryer than average.

As the days shorten and the sun sinks behind the hills to the south a little earlier every day, I decided to remove the covers on my solar water heater.

Every summer I cover ⅔ of the tubes to prevent the water boiling in the storage tank. It’s Ok having high performance tubes, until you have the heat and sunshine that we have had.

So the tubes are now fully exposed and will remain in this state for the next six months.

While I was up on the roof, what I did notice was how the leaves on the few deciduous trees and shrubs behind my home are all changing colour.

Usually our Autumn is long and drawn out, with some plants losing their leaves in August and others still having leaves in December. This year because of the heat and lack of any appreciable rainfall, the colour changes are really noticeable.

Even on the road side verges, shrubs are really starting to take on their autumn colours, far more than I have noticed in previous years.

I have to admit to being a little conflicted this week about spreading some seeds.

Walking up the old donkey track, the area where I have surveyed the wild flowers for several years, I realised that after the municipality clear-cut the entire width of the path in 2025, because of the timing, annual wild flowers didn’t set seed.

This year, there were stretches of the path which were completely devoid of wild flowers.

In the Top Orchard this summer, I found some really deep red wild Poppy in flower. I have let them go to seed, so this week I collected some of the seed heads and broke them open to get at the grain-of-sand size seeds inside.

In another area of the orchard there are Wild Gladioli, Gladiolus illyricus, so I collected some of their seeds too. Then just for good measure, I collected seeds from another Mediterranean native, Honesty, Lunaria annua. All were placed in separate paper envelopes.

I then went for a walk up the lane and spread the different seeds in areas where this year there have been no wild flowers. My confliction was because I was wondering whether I should have been doing my own “re-wilding” of the margins of this public footpath?

On the other hand, I have redistributed the seeds of local plants which appeared in my orchard. So I am just spreading local indigenous seeds in an area that has been damaged by humans.

No AI in use here

I have mentioned before that you will not find any AI generated content in my blog. Nor are there any AI generated photographs, the so called AI Slop.

However, I have an admission… I do use FI – Feline intelligence.

This week I was working online in one of the groups I administer and much as now, I had some of the felines in, on or around my desk. Currently Callie, my 16 year old senior cat is on my knee…

Going out to lock up for the night, I thought no more about it.

When I came back, I found that my youngest, Živa, was on the keyboard and had posted 678 messages to the group.

Each message consisted of S~#. Somehow she managed to operate just the right combination of keys to create and send a continuous stream of messages. At least it wasn’t four characters. 😹

I need to do some more keyboard skills training with her, together with probably building a keyboard cover…

Covers Off!

I watch the weather closely because it is linked to my work around my home and I have a local weather group on FaceBook.

So when I saw on my weather station’s forecast that there was a good chance of some overnight rain Thursday into Friday, I decided to remove the sun shade covers off my citrus trees.

Looking at various forecasting websites, they all seemed to agree that as a weather front moved south over the Balkans, we would get some rain. The amount’s forecast varied, but there would be some.

The dense shade netting which I installed over my trees, was to try and prevent the summer sun from burning the leaves. The problem this year was not just the heat of the sun, but the very high temperatures in our five heatwaves. But the shade netting certainly played a part in keeping plants cooler.

However, the netting also effectively acts as an umbrella keeping rain off the trees.

There has been much research into the growth of trees, especially their underground root systems. For many tree species, their roots only extend to just beyond the drip line of the leaves and branches.

This means that rain falling on the shade netting would run off beyond the root system of the trees. So I decided to remove the covers.

Working on a warm and sunny Thursday morning, I removed all twelve covers, neatly folding them, ready for installation next year.

The rain duly arrived overnight Thursday into Friday and when I checked the citrus monitor today, the soil moisture is now 30%, up from 15% at the start of the week, and several of my citrus trees, whilst not looking in the peak of good health, they are green and still alive – just – so that is an improvement on last week.

I remain pessimistic about the fate of The majority of the citrus trees in the orchard, but it seems that some have survived. I will watch with interest to see what happens when the winter rains finally arrive.

Photo woes

Write out 100 lines:

I must learn to be more organised.
I must learn to be more organised.
I must learn to be more organised…

Does this bring back any memories anyone???

About two weeks ago – I say about because I’m not sure exactly when – I was looking for a photo, or a document and up popped an image I have no recollection of taking, of my old Range Rover, at night, on the apron at Leconfield, with the Stemlight up and flood lights working.

After looking at the image, I moved on, having found what I was actually looking for.

Some of my dear readers are aware that I have a reference collection of door decals. These are the county emblems which once adorned the doors of police vehicles, as local identifiers. Now few forces use them, but vehicle restorers often request a high resolution image of a certain decal, so they can have it reproduced.

This week I was asked if I knew how to wire up a Stemlight. The very short answer was “No I didn’t”, but it set me of on a quest to a) find the photo again (abject failure) and b) to locate an installation manual for these useful pieces of kit.

If you are not aware, the Stemlight system was made by Dale electric, then based at Filey, now called Dale Power Solutions, from a little further up the coast at Eastfield, Scarborough.

They were a fantastic piece of emergency equipment. Fitted inside a small dustbin like drum, on the roof of a vehicle, the mast could be extended 2.5 metres above the roof of the vehicles and it would illuminate a 33 metre diameter circle around it.

All the emergency services used them and there was one on all the company Range Rovers I used to drive. You didn’t use them every day, but when you needed light, they were literally “brilliant”!

I tracked down an installation and user manual for my colleague, for which he was most grateful.

However, no matter how I have searched, I cannot find the photo I was looking for. What did surprise me was that when I did an unindexed search of my Network Attached Storage (NAS), there were 198 thousand Jpeg images….

No, I didn’t search them all!

Doors are closing – please mind the gap

For the first time in months, I have closed my windows this week.

As we passed the Autumn Equilux on Friday (different to the Equinox, which was Wednesday), the night time temperatures are starting to drop.

I have recorded a change from 19°C on the 21st September to 12.4°C at 05:35 this morning.

So my windows which have been open since the start of May have been closed to keep heat in the house.

To keep insects, especially our voracious, biting Tiger mosquitoes out, all my doors and windows have an insect screen. Some I leave in place all year round, but the screen doors I change in the spring and autumn.

This is a storm porch I constructed when I first bought my home, as a “temporary” measure until I got my extension built. What was very temporary has become somewhat permanent.

Even though I constructed the two doors myself, out of the cheapest local materials, they still work well. So using that dreadful American euphamism, “if it aint broke, don’t fixt it”, I merely changed over the door from summer to winter. NCG